Interrogating the Iliad: the Wrath of Achilles
- Argo Crew
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
The very first word of the Iliad, in the original Greek, is "wrath."
The entire poem, all twenty-four books of it, grows out of a single explosion of anger between two men. Everything that follows, the deaths, the funerals, the burning city, traces back to one insult and one refusal to let it go.
The poem opens by announcing exactly what it's about:
Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans. (Homer, Iliad 1.1–2)
The cause is almost embarrassingly small on the surface. Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek army, is forced to give up a captive woman he'd claimed as a war prize. Furious about the loss of status, he decides to take Achilles' own captive, Briseis, as a replacement.
This was nothing less than a public humiliation, proof that Achilles' years of fighting and killing for the Greek cause counted for nothing next to Agamemnon's authority.
Achilles doesn't hold back his fury. He turns on Agamemnon in front of the entire army:
Wine-bibber, with the face of a dog and the heart of a hind, you never dare to go out with the host in fight, nor yet with our chosen men in ambuscade. (Homer, Iliad 1.225–228)
Ambuscade refers to launching a surprise stealth attack. It's a direct attack on Agamemnon's courage, the single most important trait a Greek leader was supposed to have. From this point on, Achilles refuses to fight. He withdraws to his tents with his soldiers and lets the rest of the Greek army struggle without him, even as they start losing badly.
By Book 9, the Greeks are desperate enough to send envoys to Achilles with an enormous peace offering: gold, women, cities, even one of Agamemnon's own daughters in marriage. Achilles turns all of it down. His anger isn't really about the treasure, and no amount of treasure can undo the insult. This is the same moment where he explains that he'd rather have a short, glorious life than a long, comfortable one, which tells us that Achilles' wrath isn't just an emotional overreaction, it's tangled up with his entire sense of honour and purpose.
The real turning point comes in Book 16, when Achilles' closest companion, Patroclus, is killed in battle by the Trojan prince Hector. Suddenly Achilles' anger has a new target, and it becomes something closer to pure rage than righteous anger.
By Book 22, when Achilles finally corners Hector outside the walls of Troy, the language describing him has shifted from human to something closer to a predator. As Hector lies dying and begs for his body to be returned to his family for a proper burial, Achilles' response is brutal:
Dog, talk not to me neither of knees nor parents; would that I could be as sure of being able to cut your flesh into pieces and eat it raw, for the ill you have done me, as I am that nothing shall save you from the dogs. (Homer, Iliad 22.346–348)
Then, after Hector dies, Achilles doesn't stop:
He pierced the sinews at the back of both his feet from heel to ancle and passed thongs of ox-hide through the slits he had made: thus he made the body fast to his chariot, letting the head trail upon the ground. (Homer, Iliad 22.395–400)
Dragging an enemy's corpse behind a chariot, in front of that enemy's own family and city walls, was about as far outside normal Greek warrior conduct as it gets. Even other characters in the poem are shocked by it. This is wrath that has completely outgrown its original cause.
That final scene is part of why the Iliad has lasted so long. It's not really a story about anger being good or bad, but rather it's a story about what anger costs the person carrying it.
Until next time,
λεῖος πλόος!
Written by Eleanor Russell
Education and Programs Officer
Hellenic Museum
Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Samuel Butler. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898.
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